The grant-funded phase of the The Modernist Versions Project (2012-2014) is now over. For a record of all activities relating to this phase of the project, please scroll through the individual posts below or visit our About page; you may also use the search box to find a specific topic or person relating to our work. If you’d like to see the collection of texts we have produced (and continue to produce), please visit our library.

* As we continue to develop the z-axis tool, we would first like to extend our appreciation to the 2015 Modernist Studies Association â€œZ-Axisâ€ seminar participants for testing and providing valuable feedback for an early version of the tool. We would also like acknowledge and thank Emory Universityâ€™s Center for Digital Scholarship. Much of our current and future development of the tool follows on a demonstration of the tool at and feedback from the Center.

Z-Axis: From Methodology to Useable Tool

How does a text shape a city? How does a novel contest or reify popular narratives of a given place? How does the history of a place inform our understanding of a text? Such are the questions the Modernist Versions Project sought to explore when it developed the z-axis methodologyâ€”a methodology that produced a three-dimensional model that visualized the way a text transformed a city.

An image of our original workflow

The first instantiation of the project requiredheavy XML markup and knowledge of XSLT by already time-stretched researchers. The time spent encoding, however, truncated the time literary scholars had to do what they do best: analyze text. If we wanted to develop a methodology that scholars would use, we would have to make it accessible. We needed to reduce the barriers of time and computational expertise usually required for geospatial analyses of modernist texts. We needed to develop a tool that was easy to use and allowed researchers to upload the texts and maps that interested them.

Project Updates

The past several months have seen some substantial updates for the z-axis team. First, weâ€™ve turned a time consuming methodology into an easy to use, working tool: zaxis.uvic.ca.

The website for the z-axis tool

Early versions of the tool allowed users to choose from a small repository of texts or upload their own text to the server. The tool then used the Stanford Core Named Entity Recognition software (NER) to pick out all the place names and identify their frequency. The z-axis tool mapped the place names and warped one of three listed maps based on the frequency of place name occurrence in a text.

An image of an early z-axis map

Developing the initial tool was the first major step forward for the team. The second step forward was user-testing. The Z-Axis Seminar at the Modernist Studies Association conference in November 2015 gave us our first chance to test the tool with our target users: modernist scholars. The participants used the tool to analyze a modernist text and wrote papers based on their geospatial readings of Mrs. Dalloway, Jacobâ€™s Room, The Secret Agent, and other modernist works. Their intricate analyses of these texts showed us that the tool was in fact useful for literary scholars; it also proved to us that we (or rather our brilliant developer, Colin Jones) could design the tool to do so much more.

added floating tags over the map that identify the place names associated with a warped area.

Z-axis map with sentiment analysis

The development we are most excited about is sentiment analysis. This added feature means that you can see how a text like Mrs Dalloway inflects London with positive or negative sentiment. Is Hyde Park associated with positive language? How does this compare to the area around Big Ben? Are there distinct clusters of positivity? Why?

Your Feedback

As we continue to develop the z-axis tool, we plan on refining the sentiment analysis to identify more nuanced emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, and frustration. We will also add a feature that shows you which section of the text is linked to a particular place. Because this is a tool designed for researchers, we welcome your feedback. Let us know what would you like to see from this humanities centered, geospatial analysis tool.

The title “Open Hemingway” is both a compound noun and the imperative: open editions that want to be read.

The MVP has just launched its first critical editions with the 1923 and 1924 states of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, released in the nick of time for Papa’s 116th birthday. A third volume is to follow shortly. These are annotated editions intended for classroom use, but the scarcity of the original texts means these editions are the first accessible to many scholars. It is also important to see the development of this portentous book, calling into being as it did a new standard for American literature and a style to be emulated a thousand times over.

A hearty thank you to everyone who made Bloomsday2015.com such a success! Once again, David Peacock welcomed Ulysses-loversÂ to the James Joyce Bistro for a night of celebration and merriment. It was an excellent evening that brought the University of Victoria, local businesses, and community together to celebrate the life of James Joyce.

News by Category

What are Versions?

Versions are the different forms texts assume as they move from manuscript to typescript, from serialization to first book edition, and across various book formats during their publication history.
Starting in June 2012, with the serial release of a digitized 1st edition of Ulysses, the MVP aims to spark a versioning culture in modernist studies by making available digitized texts that can be studied, searched, and compared.
You can see much of our students' work at the Maker Lab in the Humanities.